Science is to know, religion is to believe. That's that simple.
Some things have to be seen to be believed (empirical evidence) other things have to be believed to be seen (the development of a loving relationship). This is why perfunctory Christmas gifts are false, if you despise the person you are gifting to.
Back in the day, "scientia" meant knowledge in Latin (Logos in Greek aka Jesus in the Gospel of John). That is how the Catholic Church still uses the word. One can know the Church's official view of a particular saint or miracle .. that is knowledge in the old sense. Since Galileo mostly, and this is where Galileo ran afoul of the Roman Inquisition .. claimed to have knowledge in the old sense concerning the Church that was outside of the official view. In their terms, this was wrong. He wasn't being an atheist, he was a better Catholic than the Pope!
But as a transition figure (he was a good Catholic), he was also using "scientia" in a Aristotle-corrected manner as for example the gravity experiment. Galileo said that the idea that the Moon causes the tides is lunacy ;-) He put, in his studies, the evidence of the senses is higher than the dogma of the Church regarding Aristotle as being the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge in the old sense. Which is ironic, because earlier the Church had accepted neo-Platonic dogma and fought the introduction of Aristotle into the universities.
Copernicus revived the Sun-centric theory of Aristarchus, but in fact it had more epicycles than the Earth-centric theory of Ptolemy, it wasn't simpler. Galileo agreed with Copernicus anyway, because it seemed to him to make more sense, because of the moons of Jupiter (evidence of the senses thanks to the telescope he invented). Kepler's results weren't fully accepted until Newton. Proof of the rotation of the spherical Earth (proven by the voyage of Magellan in 1522 and indirect evidence earlier) wasn't observed directly until the Foucault pendulum in 1851.
Newton came along later and showed indirectly, that gravity must exist on Earth and in the Heavens as the same thing, and that this validated the ellipses of Kepler. But this required co-inventing Calculus and developing classical mechanics. Kepler accepted the elliptical orbits for the same reason as Galileo accepted the gravity experiment ... observation trumped dogma regarding circles as being heavenly perfect. This wasn't apparent in earlier inaccurate data.
Communist dogmatic "science" (Lysenko in biology) aka dialectical materialism, was just as wrong as the Catholic Church, because it dismissed empirical evidence to the contrary. The Soviet Union propagandized abiogenic petroleum, expecting to pump oil on the Moon ;-) The notion that scientists are naturally Leftist ... is intelligencia virtue signaling ;-) Borrowing the authority of doctors of medicine with Covid but ignoring their political and commercial involvements is the same thing.
"Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science." - Karl Marx. He was no scientist or mathematician or logician. His economics is based on unlimited free energy and unlimited natural resources on the one hand, and class warfare on the other. With steam engine automation there would be no reason for anyone to work, everything would be free (see World Economic Forum today). The first part is what all utopian sci fi is based on. Class warfare is real though. And naturally Leftists want to claim all educated people are part of their tribe (except for Pol Pot who really understood the intelligencia as useful idiots).
